As the former City of Portland Commissioner of Transportation and current Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Earl Blumenauer (D-Portland) does not take criticism of bicycling lying down.

Blumenauer’s office, working on facts provided by the Portland Bureau of Transportation, issued a response to allegations made yesterday by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) that a federal grant for bikeway signage in Portland was “wasteful.” In his Waste Book 2010 report Coburn mischaracterized the signage project, claiming that $900,000 was spent on bike network wayfinding signs when similar signs were already installed. In a statement titled, Waste Book 2010 Inaccuracies, Blumenauer’s office listed details about the project that Coburn left out of his report:

Wayfinding signage was a small percentage of the total funds allocated and expended.

Other advance warning crossing signage at busier streets was added for safety of pedestrians and cyclists. (see photo at top of post)

The City also removed some existing crossing signage and reinstalled it to improve visibility at existing crossings.

Total for all signage (wayfinding and safety) with sign posts and footings was $69,180.

New wayfinding signage was placed in areas without existing signage.

The City will have constructed an additional 30 miles of new bicycle boulevard facilities in two years by June 2011 – the ARRA grant provided for the necessary wayfinding and crossing signage for these new facilities.

New wayfinding signage altered the existing design by making the destinations (words and distance) larger and reducing the size of the bicycle symbol. The destinations and distance are the most important information on the signs.

Existing signage was left in place – new signage is not duplicative but installed in areas that lacked signage.

MUTCD standard pavement markings (sharrows) were the highest percentage of total funds allocated.

Other costs included engineering, project management, contractor compliance for pollution control and erosion control, contractor mobilization and traffic control.

Blumenauer’s office also included a cost breakdown for materials and installation:

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Blumenauer for president. The more I hear about that guy, the more I like him. If we had more representatives that valued bicycling/alternative transportation, we’d be healthier, safer, happier, greener, and less wasteful. This post fits in perfectly with today’s trailsnet blog topic.

I agree. I interviewed Blumenauer as a journalism student at MHCC more than 30 years ago. (I think he was on the Board). Only politician I’ve ever interviewed that didn’t talk in circular reasoning and add a lot of obvious “spin” to his answers.

Truth that Republicans don’t want you to know, thanks to Blumenauer for getting the facts out, I also hope they get press coverage. Coburn cleverly overlooks waste in how Oklahoma has spent stimulus funds in his paper, right wing television and radio gets lots to blabber about….mission accomplished.

dan – That’s about $200 per sharrow. Seems a little steep to me, but there’s probably some buried costs in that which we aren’t seeing. Sharrows only recently have been standardized (Mia Burk talks about it a bit in her book, “Joyride”), so some (perhaps much?) of that cost is systemic – i.e. for the program itself, rather than the installation cost per sharrow.

If Roger Geller or someone else from PBOT has any details on that and is willing to post them, I’d love to know it.

Then there is the labor costs to roll trucks out and melt them onto the pavement. And there are probably a few consumables as well, like cleaners and fuel for the trucks and torches. Labor and consumables are probably the lions share of the cost…

You might want to price it out yourself sometime…remember, you can’t really take shortcuts and cheap out on the poles, they have to last for decades. We’re talking something close to Schedule 40 oilfield pipe.

Blumenauer and your staff….nice work. Good on you too maus, for getting the info posted here.

What’s wrong with that Coburn? Sure, blowing up examples of mis-spending when they occur, as an offensive strategy against opponents is understandable, but something like Coburn has done here with his bleep about ‘such and such amount of money spent on some signs out in Oregon’….getting almost completely wrong, leaves him looking like a nitwit.

valkraider $200 seems steep? Thermoplastic probably isn’t cheap. Then there is the labor costs to roll trucks out and melt them onto the pavement. And there are probably a few consumables as well, like cleaners and fuel for the trucks and torches. Labor and consumables are probably the lions share of the cost…

$200 apiece feels like it’s in the right ballpark, but did we really need that many? There are multiple sharrows per block on the Lincoln bike boulevard…one per block or one every 2 blocks would have been sufficient. To be honest, I don’t feel like drivers there needed to be reminded that they’re sharing the lane with bicycles: in 5 years of commuting on Lincoln, I haven’t had any significant issues with motorists.

per MUTCD, section 9C.07: “If used, the Shared Lane Marking should be placed immediately after an intersection and spaced at intervals not greater than 250 feet thereafter.” again, PBoT has used these sharrows as in effect wayfinders on sidestreets, rather than for their intended purpose, which is lateral lane positioning on somewhat more heavily traveled streets, but in order to get the stimulus money they had to use something that was at least nominally MUTCD compliant.

One annoying aspect of this is that it takes so little effort to publish inaccurate information for the sensational “sound bite” (Coburn) but much more effort to produce accurate information for the correction (Blumenauer). Cheers to Blumenauer for the effort.

To clarify, in my experience, motorists’ behavior has not been such that I feel they are unaware of/unready to share the road with bikes on the Lincoln bike corridor.

I don’t know how a bicyclist could stop a car from passing on the downhill: even if you ride in the middle of the lane, they can still get around. I would not hug parked cars to let a motorist around if there was also oncoming traffic, but if it’s just parked car, bicycle, and overtaking motorist, there’s plenty of room to go around.

I guess my point is that more sharrows (where there were already some on the road) doesn’t seem like the best use of money from a “injury reduction per $” viewpoint. I would have liked to see some of that $480k spent on putting barriers between bikes and cars on the Hawthorne Bridge. I have had one or two hair-raising experiences heading eastbound.

One thing that most folks missed about State Question 755 is that, while it was heavily advertised on the whole Sharia/international law thing, is that it also covers treaties. This was really a pretty good attempt at screwing over the Indian nations that comprise the vast majority of Oklahoma’s territory.

Right, Fox News will report Coburn’s report for days, I’m sure they will not find Blumenauer necessary to report or comment on. That is their definition of “fair and balanced”. The sheep will lap it up,…. suckers.

The posted figure for installing thermo sharrows looks reasonable given historical costs I have seen before – thermo stencils cost most of that $200. They are worth the cost given their 3 to 5 year life span vs 1 year painted stencil life span. (This is one of the hidden costs of studded tire use in our community.)

Keep it up, Earl. And sharrows as they were mostly placed in this project are pretty redundant, but they’re definitely graphically better than the earlier tiny stencils. Too bad I mostly see them on bike boulevards where we’re not being threatened (much).

If Coburn’s asking for a multilateral division of the US, then he better be careful what he wishes for: The tribes won’t hesitate to leave Oklahoma entirely under such a division, and Oklahoma would be on it’s own to rebuilt the snarl of highways it has. Otherwise, we’re all in this together. A better question is why Coburn’s giving California carte blanche in his criticisms.

Well the reverse is true – why are my tax dollars being spent on projects anywhere else other than Portland Oregon? I can easily answer that with a very positive answer and it has to do with benefiting the ‘commons’

It never ceases to amaze me that way the Portland ultra-left wingers can spin anything. This is a waste of money, period. After all, we can’t get the potholes in our roads repaired, fix decrepit bridges, etc. And the so-called “liberals” and “progressives” spend most of their time dreaming up new excuses to close local schools and bus kids further and further. I’m curious if they have a plan for how they plan to pay Russia and China back the $900k the federal government had to borrow to do this. Not likely… It’s always someone else’s responsibility.